Searchy Stuff

Posted Old Stuff

Day: September 10, 2017

This weekend was perhaps the last chance this year for a long weekend. A few years ago some good friends who started out as work peeps recommended Apart Schultes to us for a pretty, affordable, friendly place to stay in the off-season in the Austrian ski region St. Anton.

We drove down on Thursday after work and it was a grueling slog of a trip through Munich (directly, not around it on one of those rings?) and out across the border into Austria via Garmisch-Partenkirchen. It got dark and some construction zones were messing with Waze (the GPS software that runs on my phone). We were hoping for a four-hour trip, but it turned out to be just over 5. We spent the last fifteen minutes in the right town, but not sure if we were on the right street, differentiating between 226, 227, and 227b. Fatigue was surely a factor by that point.

Friday

Our patient hosts set us up with the St. Anton Sommerkarte right away the next morning. It entitled us to use the Postbus 4242 line from Pettneu into St. Anton for the entire length of our stay, and all the cable car gondola rides we could handle for one day. Out of the two full days we’d have to spend in the region, the first was predicted to be the better one, weather-wise.

Plenty of bus stops were marked, but not all were in service in the off-season. So we strolled around the village looking for the remaining functional bus stop. We finally found it with a little help from the town’s tourist information office.

Pettneu am ArlbergPettneu am Arlberg

Less than 15 minutes later, we got off the bus at in St. Anton at the end of the line, but the foot of several gondolas. We picked the Galzigbahn, took 3 cable cars up to the tippy top of the craggy peak Valluga, and marveled.

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Galzigbahn / Vallugabahn

Getting up there, walking around slack-jawed at the landscape and our luck with the weather, having lunch at one of the middle stations and getting back down took most of the day.

Saturday

We took the bus to St. Anton (still free!) and got a nice group ticket offer to Bregenz. We’d hoped to walk around on the shore of the Bodensee1 and maybe take a ferry across the lake to Lindau before the rain set in, but alas…it got there before us and was determined to thwart all our attempts to do something outdoorsy. So we ducked into a museum for a couple hours — the Vorarlberg Museum gave us a nice overview of historical and contemporary topics in local culture.